Open AccessAcquisition of Noun Inflection in Lithuanian as a Foreign Language: a Qualitative Study
Author(s) -
Anzhalika Dubasava
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
respectus philologicus
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2335-2388
pISSN - 1392-8295
DOI - 10.15388/respectus.2020.37.42.39
Subject(s) - lithuanian , inflection , linguistics , noun , nominative case , first language , computer science , second language acquisition , foreign language , psychology , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , verb , philosophy
The aim of the research was to investigate how native speakers of Russian, which is a highly complex inflectional language, cope with the acquisition of the similar by structure and complexity Lithuanian language. The subjects were adults of different age and education who learned Lithuanian in Belarus. I analyse errors related to the acquisition of noun case. The errors are divided into formal (acquisition of endings) and conceptual ones (choice of the appropriate case). I shortly compare my results with the results of similar research conducted in Lithuania where the subjects were native speakers of different languages.The results of the study show that similar errors are typical for native speakers of different languages irrespective of their morphological complexity. A complex inflectional system of a native language is not necessarily beneficial, but it seems to give some advantages for the acquisition of semantic (not syntactic) cases.